Tuesday, September 16, 2014

7 Questions with Robert Wilton, Author

Robert Wilton is a writer and
diplomat. His latest historical novel,
The Spider of Sarajevo('a beautifully written, elegant spy thriller',
The Times), is newly available through Amazon.com. Set exactly one hundred years ago, at the outbreak of
World War One, it draws on documents from the archive of a mysterious
organization in the shadows of the British Government, and on the author's own
experience in the Balkans. He was advisor to the Prime Minister of Kosovo in
the years leading to the country's independence, and has more recently been
running an international mission in Albania. He is also co-founder of The Ideas
Partnership, a grass-roots charity working in education, the environment and
cultural heritage. There's more at www.robertwilton.com, and you can follow
@ComptrollerGen. He divides his time between the Balkans and Cornwall, England.

1.How
and/or when did you get you hooked on history?

As early as I can remember. There
was a legendary series of children's books in England called the Ladybird
Books, and in them I could read about our Kings and Queens, with a beautiful
picture on every page. And I remember finding a set of postcards in a drawer at
home - I think my parents had got them free with something - each a beautiful
painting of one of Britain's heroes with some text on the back; I was
fascinated by those faces, and read their stories over and over.

2.What
role does history play or has it played in your personal life?

It's always been my way into
anything. My Dad and I researched our family history - this was back in those
ancient days before the internet, when you had to go to an institution in
London to get copies of birth, marriage and death certificates, with the
scratchy signatures of my forefathers (or in some cases just an 'x' because
they couldn't write their names). When we were done with that we researched
who'd lived in our house. Any time I go somewhere new I have to know its
history: it's how I understand the world, how I see it. I studied history all
through school - I got lucky with some great teachers; even outside fiction,
history is story-telling - and then University. When I was writing short
stories, my themes kept coming back to history and its resonances: a soldier
returning to the French village where he hid from the Nazis and fell in love; a
decades-old mystery solved when a group of veterans returns to their
battlefield.

3.How
is/How was history a part of your professional life/career?

One of the many over-clever sayings
about the Balkans is that they've produced more history than they can consume.
The people of the region think and talk too much about their history - or, in
fact, usually about a nationalistic, mythological version of it. But if history
doesn't excuse the crimes and idiocies of the present, it can explain where
they came from. Too often the international community has blundered into
interventions without really understanding what they're getting into. If I want
to help people in south-eastern Europe escape the toxic legacies of their
history, I must first understand them, otherwise there's no chance of finding
the right road to change. It's also a matter of respect to a people.

4.Why
is studying/knowing history important?

Mark Twain said that history rhymes;
and he was a wise fellow. It's not only about the direct links - understanding
how the United States of America, or indeed Kosovo, came to be independent and
what that means for today; understanding why there's DNA from Roman soldiers in
the population of a village in the north of England, or why there are Scottish
and Irish family names across a chunk of the mid-western US. It's also about
Mark Twain's rhymes - the patterns of history, the echoes. Exploring history -
any history - taking apart the mechanism and trying to work out what makes it
tick, gives you ideas and approaches you might apply in a completely different
historical context. The brilliant novelist of Rome, M.C.Scott, says that when
she wanted to try to understand what it was like to be a Roman legionary she
read the memoirs of soldiers from World War Two. I once listened to a guy
lecturing about the unique and unprecedented phenomenon of Al-Qaeda, as a
non-hierarchical movement of belief flourishing thanks to the internet
revolution in communications technology. And I thought of Britain in the
mid-17th Century, and the spread of diverse, mainly Protestant strands of
belief thanks to the revolutionary power of printing and increasing literacy.
History also teaches you skills of thought, of analysis, in a more general way.
I approach any problem - a challenge at work, maybe; probably even a faulty
light switch - as I approach a question of history, trying to see the context,
trying to see how the factors come together. P.s. History is great stories; and
stories are how we as humans make sense of our existence.

5.What
makes a great historical novel?

A feeling for history, and a feeling
for the individuals caught up in it. Preferably a great battle, a great love
and a great death; ideally, the constant sense that you don't know where the
history ends and the fiction begins. I don't know if Gone With The Wind
is great history or great literature, but it's a great historical novel because
it captures the scale of a vast war and keeps your attention through two people
you care about. For most English people, Gone With The Windis
that war. Tolstoy - the grand-daddy - portrays the epic sweep of what at the
time seemed like the greatest war there had been, and gives you an army of
characters to care about. A great historical novel doesn't have to be big in
size or focus: Daphne Du Maurier's The King's General is a little gem.
And now there's the astonishing, prize-winning Hilary Mantel, who writes
history that you can smell.

6.Both
your British government career and your writing career have focused on the
Balkans. Why the Balkans?

Chance. Bismarck said (see
over-clever sayings, above) that the Balkans weren't worth the bones of a
single Pomeranian Grenadier; I don't know if they're worth the career of a
single Englishman. In the British Ministry of Defence I started working on the
region in 1999, during the NATO bombing campaign against the Belgrade regime
and its oppression of the people of Kosovo. Each time I was thinking of moving
on, someone would offer me something to do with the region which used my
growing experience. When I was looking to work abroad in 2006 - go anywhere, do
anything, maybe volunteer - I got a call saying that the new Prime Minister of Kosovo
wanted a British Advisor, and it looked like me. Coming from a pretty
traditional - I guess pretty sheltered - background, suddenly immersing myself
in a new culture - particularly one that was so scarred by so much suffering -
blew my mind. The Spider of Sarajevo is dedicated to the Albanians,
because of their extraordinary hospitality - to this guest, like so many before
him. Helping to run a charity and, separately, an international human rights
and democracy mission, I've had the great good fortune to find in the Balkans a
place where I can try to help - in a small way to make a positive difference.
And once in the Balkans, of course, I got interested in the history. In a place
where widespread literacy and education came late, I learned the power of
stories being told around the fire and down the generations. And I was inspired
by the landscape, and by the traditions and spirit of the people, and that's
what gives The Spider of Sarajevo its dramatic opening scene, the
subplot of unstoppable revenge that runs through the novel, and of course the
climax in Sarajevo.

7.Tell
us about your latest novel, The Spider of Sarajevo.

I've been really excited by the
response to its topicality. It's set in the weeks around the outbreak of World
War One, and so it's been published exactly one hundred years after the events
it illuminates. There's so much interest at the moment in how and why the world
went to war in that mad summer of 1914, and so I think the intrigue and
adventure in The Spider of Sarajevo has extra appeal. The mysteries it
explores - what was going on in the shadows in those desperate weeks - have a
particular resonance. It's a picture of what Europe was like at that
extraordinary moment, and of course it's a novel of espionage and action as well.
With war imminent, an anonymous official of the British Government took a
spectacular gamble with the future of British intelligence - which at that time
was in its infancy. As the documents used in the novel reveal, he sent four
young agents out into Europe - and even they didn't know exactly what their
mission was. Their adventures, and what happened to them in the end, are what
drives the novel - and everything converged on Sarajevo and the spark that
ignited a world war.